


Your mama’s got plans and your daddy’s aim is true

by storm_petrel



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Accidental Pregnancy, Destroy Ending, F/M, Post-Mass Effect 3, dumbfucks in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-30
Updated: 2016-08-30
Packaged: 2018-08-11 22:36:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7910224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storm_petrel/pseuds/storm_petrel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was no Alliance manual for trying to drag two trillion people fighting and screaming through absolute certain death, and there was nothing about what to do when you unexpectedly got spat out on the other side, either. And there was *definitely* nothing about what to do if your hot, older-than-you, currently missing-in-action boyfriend knocked you up at some stage in that sequence of events.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your mama’s got plans and your daddy’s aim is true

**Author's Note:**

> Finally finished playing Mass Effect, only half a decade behind everyone else. Here's a dumb self-indulgent story about how Shepard accidentally charged headlong into the end of the universe with a baby in tow, and what happened next.

 

She’s in the Citadel, dark and rotting, closed-up and haunted, the first time she feels the kick.

 

In retrospect, Jocasta was surprised she had noticed, given the shape she’s in. Staggering down the hall, blood in her eyes, cut up in a dozen places, a hundred hurts clamoring for her attention, and then there’s this tiny, swift, sharp _kick_ , right in her gut.

 

Her first thought, _that’s not a floating rib._

Her second thought, _oh fuck._

Jocasta Shepard is twenty-seven, with a colony-world education in reproductive biology, meaning cows, pornography and men, in that order; she’s had a hormone implant since she joined up at nineteen, and—oh, it’s Cerberus. _Fucking Cerberus._ Rapid healing, rapid _drug_ _metabolism_ , and obviously Miranda may have left a thing or eight out of her _so you’ve just been resurrected and cybernetically augmented by a shadowy agency with_ profoundly _dubious morals_ speech.

 

A kick, again, and Jocasta puts one hand on her belly, where her armor hasn’t quite been sheared away. She’d had a little swell there when she’d last looked at herself, in her quarters on the Normandy, naked and wet from the shower, up a few kilos according to the scale by the head. She’d put it down to getting older, burning a little slower, and resolved to make Kaidan and James go running with her so she’d at least get the pleasure of watching their asses flex in athletic shorts.

 

Kaidan, thirty-two when she first met him, in her bed not long after that. Tangled up in her sheets and her legs, the gold of his skin luminescent in the blue light of her quarters, laughing as she pulled him down on top of her. Sex made him uninhibited, giddy, and she always felt him smiling against her skin when he fucked her, when she dug her heels in and cursed god and told him _Kaidan yes._

She’s never felt safer than with him on her flank, eyes sharp and pistol drawn, at her hip with a smile lurking in his eyes while she diplomatically browbeats another race into this war, asleep behind her with his big arms around her, his heart beating against her back like the only steady thing in the universe.

 

And maybe he’s gone, now, maybe the Normandy’s been shot out of space, nothing left but a few falling streaks of light against the atmosphere. Maybe he’s gone and they’re all gone and she’s alone, and Anderson is slowly dying in her earpiece and all she has left is this tiny speck of a curled-up thing inside her, slowly unwinding a kick as if to say, _nice places you bring me, Mom_.

 

In her heart, something starts to burn. Another time, it might scare her, but Jocasta left her fear somewhere about two and a half Reapers back, and she puts her hand on her belly again.  _Hello_ , she thinks. The whole universe has gone to screaming hell with zombie murder robots and everything is _insane_ , but right now, there’s just this one moment, her and her gun and her baby. Kaidan’s baby. She kissed him goodbye and shoved him into Garrus’s arms as the _Normandy_ carried them away, and now she’s brought her and Kaidan’s baby _to the end of the god damn world_.

 

Oh, he’s going to be _beyond_ pissed.

 

_Hello, baby_.

 

Her armor’s a burned-out shell, she’s almost definitely bleeding faster than the Cerberus cybernetics can patch, and she’s got maybe two shots left in her gun. And her hair keeps falling in her fucking eyes because all her pins are gone and her hair wrap snapped somewhere back in that last explosion on Earth, so this is probably as bad as it’s going to get.

 

Anderson is whispering in her ear, and he sounds like blood loss and a traumatic brain injury, but she barely hears him. _Please, baby,_ she thinks. Prays maybe, it’s hard to tell. _Please hang on tight in there and I will do my god damndest to get us out of here alive._

 

***

 

Jocasta had once overheard Joker arguing with Adams in the Mess. “Yeah, well, one day, I’d like to see what the Commander looks like when she’s not wearing her hair like a murder ballerina, but we can’t always get what we want.”

 

_Well, Joker_ , she’d thought about saying. _It’s about sixty centimeters long, red as fuck, and my mother used to brush it at night before Batarian slavers came and killed everyone I loved_. But she’s not cruel, not like that, and Joker’s not wrong. Scraped back and twisted up in a knot at the back of her head, it doesn’t look pretty and doesn’t do her much good beyond making it slightly softer when a charging Krogan mercenary bounces her helmeted skull off the ground. She’d almost shaved it down to fuzz so many times, but then she would have missed that soft, unguarded look in Kaidan’s eyes, the first time she pulled the pins out and shook it all free.

 

Right now, it’s the only soft thing under her. Over her, around her, it’s ferrocrete and girders and rubble and it would be dark as space but there’s a little light, just a little light, somewhere above and behind her. The dust makes her cough, and then the pain makes her want to double up and never move again.

 

_First Human SPECTRE Dies in Citadel Rubble Like a Dumb Asshole_ , _Fetus Embarrassed to be Associated With Her_ and the thought spurs her, sends her working her hips back and forth, and centimeter by centimeter, the pile of shattered ferrocrete groaning around her, she works her way free. Towards the top of the pile, where that little bit of light’s leaking in.

 

Jocasta breaks through, and it’s the brightest thing in the world. Coughing, armor torn apart, hair loose and tangled and matted around her. She heaves herself up to the top of the pile and staggers to her feet, Botticelli’s _Birth of Venus_ for the space marine generation.

 

She’s in some vast, cavernous under-chamber of the Citadel, nothing but piles and piles of rubble as far as she can see, with a few weak beams of light filtering down from somewhere high up overhead. How she lived falling all that long, long way, she has no idea. She hurts in a thousand places, but blood is crusted up on all the bare skin she can see. She assumes that’s her cybernetics saying _there, you’re not going to die in the next ten minutes anymore, now fuck off to a hospital and don’t call us ever again._

Jocasta sits down on the most stable slab she can find. Draws her knees up and rests her chin there. Keep warm, stay awake, slow down onset of psychological shock, an Alliance training manual whispers in the back of her skull, but there was no Alliance manual for trying to drag two trillion people fighting and screaming through absolute certain death, and there was nothing about what to do when you unexpectedly got spat out on the other side, either. And _definitely_ nothing about what to do if your hot, older-than-you, currently missing-in-action boyfriend knocked you up at some stage in that sequence of events.

_Hi baby,_ she thinks, and for a second, she has to blink back tears. It’s been a long time since she cried. Hormones, maybe. _I just want you to know, in the interests of full disclosure, that while I am a pretty great shot and I must have a winning smile, because I keep convincing otherwise sane and intelligent people to storm dick first into total clusterfucks with me, I am probably not going to be a very good mom._ Case in point, Jocasta might be the only mom in fucking galactic history who ever went charging face-first into a full-blown Reaper invasion with her baby riding shotgun and _she didn’t even know._ She thinks about Kaidan again, and winces. _Beyond_ pissed.

 

_In my defense_ , _baby_ , she thinks, _I only ever had a mom for a few years and I don’t really remember her very well. I’m pretty sure I’ll be terrible at it because I couldn’t even keep a hamster alive_ —and that right there was the last time she’d cried, stupid really, when they’d all come back from their suicidal run to the Collector base and the cage had been broken across the shelf and his furry little body had been stiff on the floor, and she’d picked the little thing up and held it and cried then, for everyone she couldn’t save and her poor fucking hamster, cold and gone where she couldn’t bring them back. Kelly, who’d still been white and shaking herself, brought her coffee that was lukewarm with whiskey and they’d both sat on the couch for hours, Kelly’s head in her lap, while EDI told them about afterlife beliefs from various races in her calm, affectless voice.

 

Some Salarians and Asari think you get to do it all again. Ash thought you were raised to the right hand of God, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Jocasta’s never been sure what she believes.

 

She coughs, and bright blood spots the rubble.

 

And she’s scrabbling at her wrist because and there’s no way her omnitool has made it this far, no way, she hasn’t even got a shot left in her useless gun and she’s an idiot and her _baby—_

 

Okay, scratch that, what she _believes_ is that the standard military-issue Bluewire omnitool is truly a _staggering miracle_. A miracle of engineering, yeah, but that should still count. When this is all over, Jocasta is sending Aldrin Labs a fruit basket made of fucking _diamonds._ It peeps a little when her shaking fingers finally activate it, and flickers for an instant, and then it’s solidified against her arm, comforting warm orange glow, and it’s scanning, scanning—

 

And there, projected glowing in the air, with vital stats scrolling alongside, is her baby.

_Baby, you are a scrappy little fuck,_ she thinks, and she’s laughing, maybe crying a little she traces the air, her fingers touching the tight curled little fists, up in front like a boxer’s guard, little face crumpled into an intense scowl of concentration. The baby moves hard, just then, and she feels it under her burned-out armor, her thin fatigues, under her skin and muscle and blood and bones, and Jocasta puts her head down on her knees and she cries and cries.

 

Her omnitool informs her dispassionately that she’s approximately twenty weeks into gestation, the fetal heartbeat is within normal acceptable range, and that the fetus is female.  

When she’s done, she scrubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. _Anyway,_ she thinks. _Hamster notwithstanding_ , _I swear I’ll figure this shit out for you._ She thinks of the look in Kaidan’s eyes, when Garrus had been holding him upright on Normandy’s boarding ramp, hurt and bewildered and furious and so _in love_ it makes her jaw ache to remember it. And, because in her burning heart, she has to believe it’s true, _and your daddy’s coming to find us, because he loves us very much._

 

Jocasta sets her omnitool to broadcast mode. Alliance, SPECTRE, Turian, Salarian, Asari, Krogan, Quarian and Geth, hell, even Elcor, Volus, Batarian. Every emergency channel she’s ever learned, from every naval manual she’d ever read, if only to fall asleep faster at night. _Stranded operative requests pickup at Citadel._ _Medical attention required_.

 

It’s been getting dimmer and dimmer, as whatever’s left of the power here drains down. Colder too. But she unstraps most of her chestplate, because it’s getting hard to breathe. Her black undershirt doesn’t show the blood, not much. She presses one hand against her belly, just for a moment, _still there,_ and, because there’s nothing else left to do, starts working her fingers through the worst knots in her hair.

 

_Are we gonna make it, Kaidan?_

 

She blinks. She’s listed to the side. Her hair’s untangled and half-braided. It’s very cold. The light’s almost gone.

 

There was a sound behind her. Above her.

 

She doesn’t fall over when she turns, because one of her hands has locked into a death grip on the rubble slab. There’s a ship. A _ship._

 

It’s a Turian stealth shuttle, scored with burn marks all along the fuselage, but still spaceworthy. The engines are whining, barely a wash of sound and light above her, and there are six Turian commandos rappelling down towards her. She can see mandibles and prongs silhouetted in the engine’s light.

 

The first one lands in a crouch ten strides away, and he’s unhooking his harness and moving towards her all in one swift motion, and for just a second, it’s Garrus, striding out of the dark, come to pull her ass out of the fire one last time. But then it passes, and it’s a Turian commando she doesn’t know, blue tats and scraped-up armor. Young, very young.

 

The Turian crouches down, blinks, and his mandibles flare out hard. Then he says, “Holy fucking shit.”

 

Translators tend to tone down profanity, so she wonders what precisely he just said.

 

It takes the last energy she has, but Jocasta gives him her best holovid smile _(I’m Commander Shepard and this is my favorite place to bleed to death on the Citadel!)_ and says, “Could you gentlemen give us a lift to the hospital?”

 

And that’s when she gets swarmed, so really, it’s lucky for them she’s out of ammunition.

 

***

They make it back to Earth, eventually. The _Adestina Triumphant’s_ started to leak oxygen and there’s not a single thing in their medkit that’s compatible with her genetic structure, but they strap her in and two of them wrap their hands around hers, brace their arms across her chest and belly as they go howling down into the atmosphere, and it’s possible she promises a dozen beat-up, very young Turian commandos that the Primarch is personally buying them all a brand new ship with better inertial dampeners, and maybe also a puppy, right before she passes out.      

 

Apparently, the Turians make a mostly not a crash-landing somewhere on the Canadian prairie, thus increasing the number of Turian citizens to ever visit Vulcan, Alberta, by a factor of twelve. Apparently, the Turians appropriate an extremely antique fossil fuel transport and come close to breaking a land speed record on the old tarmac network of transport routes. Jocasta will hear all of this later when the Primarch sends her a message with all his best wishes, and inquires what the hell _a golden retriever, or maybe a dachshund,_ might be, and why he’s buying one for the One Ninety Fifth Recon Patrol. 

 

They try to sedate her properly when she gets to the real, serious hospital, and that’s when the Salarian doctor discovers she’s pulled a submachine gun off the soldier three steps past the front door. Jocasta definitively does _not_ say _if I wake up and this baby isn’t cheerfully punching me in the floating ribs, they are going to find parts of you staked to the ground on six fucking planets_ because Jocasta is a diplomat and a peacemaker, but her words are certainly thematically similar, at least, because the Salarian rears back, alarmed.

 

No one tries to take her submachine gun after that, though. She wakes up with it on the table next to her bed after six days in a medically induced coma, with two titanium pins in her spine, two liters of vatgrown blood, four hundred lines of dermal glue, six tubes in places she’d rather not have tubes, and one baby who’s discovered it can kick her in the bladder.

 

Admiral Hackett is standing by her bed, or it looks like him, at least, because she is on the _fine_ drugs. He doesn’t say anything, just puts a hand up when she tries to get an arm free to salute. Then he snaps off the crispest, sharpest salute, and says, “ _Shepard,”_ in a voice so choked her eyes widen in alarm.

 

In the end, ten very large Krogan volunteer to man her door, just to keep people out.  

 

***

They could jab her under the fingernails with a neural screamer, and Jocasta still wouldn’t admit to watching the vids.

 

After she made SPECTRE, there’s been something like a trend towards vids and serials about her. No one uses her name, not for long, at least, because Alliance Legal’s got all rights to her name and image on a death-grip lockdown, but other things make it out.

 

Most of it’s trash, of course, the first human SPECTRE blazing a trail across the galaxy, shooting first and always a witty quip for the follow-up, with absolute disregard for strategy or diplomacy, and nothing bad ever happens that can’t be solved with a bigger gun or bigger tits. But there’s one that’s okay. _Warrior Angels_ is produced by a nothing-budget independent film company, and they release episodes on a schedule that appears to follow whenever someone’s hangover fades long enough to hit upload, but still. The actress obviously has some training, gymnastics or ballet, and she moves like she got injured, a while back, like she can still do this, but it hurts. People die. Grenades go off in murderously quiet shrapnel clouds instead of fiery explosions. The ship’s hull is breached and people suffocate in space. Everyone drinks too much and has bad sex in dark corners.

 

_If I had the chance to do it all over again,_ she says, leaning against a mockup that looks almost, but not quite, like the Mako, _maybe I’d tell them all to go to hell, right to fucking hell, but then I wouldn’t have you, and I think that might kill me._

Jocasta has a lot of free time to watch this shit, while they put her back together.

 

She’s pretty sure the baby likes the cartoons the best. There’s one where she has pink hair, star-shaped earrings and solves interplanetary conflict with the power of friendship.

 

_Huh_.

 

Fuck it, the baby’s right. That one _is_ the best.

 

***

 

So it turns out neither saving the galaxy _or_ getting knocked up gets her out of the almighty mess after.

 

Jocasta supposes it’s fair. After all, she threw this party. Means you have to pick up the place afterwards.

 

What freaks her out, however, is that maybe she didn’t quite kill the Reapers as hard as she should have, because everyone is being fucking _good_ and _polite,_ and maybe a little zombie tech escaped into space and straight into their brains to re-adjust their piss-poor attitudes. No one even gives her the side-eye when she shows up for meetings with the Primarch and the Council wearing an oversized N7 hooded sweatshirt stretched across her belly, because all that weight she didn’t gain before showed up with a vengeance at seven months and none of her fatigues fit. They call a recess twice an hour so she can use the head. Sparatus gives her his chair. It’s _eerie._   

 

But when she thinks about it, maybe it makes sense. She’s dragged pretty much every race into a strange, cobbled-together last-ditch alliance that is somehow, against all odds, even in the absence of the galactic threat of fucking _zombie murder robots_ , still continuing to function on a day-to-day basis, because you can say what you want about heavily restructured post-war galactic trading markets guiding general social trends towards co-habitative stability, but Jocasta wonders if everyone is maybe just fucking lonely.

 

She is.

 

***

 

Commander Jocasta Shepherd receives, according to Alliance Public Relations, nine hundred thousand items of private correspondence per day. This is an average, and the number ticks up sharply if she’s been more visible in the media lately. The day the news broke that she was pregnant, it went up to eight point five million.

 

It’s insane. There’s a VI at Alliance Headquarters that is devoted to _sorting her mail_ , and there’s a team of interns who select anywhere between twenty and fifty messages a week and send them to her.

 

Jocasta assumes that they pick out the most positive, uplifting ones, because she knows there must be a million messages in that pile that say _why didn’t you save my son, my mother, my sister, my friend, our ship, our world, why are you alive when they’re dead?_

She doesn’t have an answer for that one. There was always cover, her shields always recharged in the nick of time, someone always had her back. If you sprint, you’re hard to hit. But that’s not an answer, not really.

 

One says, _Everything’s not lost because you’re here, and I’m here, and there’s still so much that we can do._

Another says, _cheer up, your baby is probably going to be incredibly cute!_

Some sly dog slipped, _when it comes to getting a dirty job done, I’ll take a red-headed woman,_ past the censors.

She keeps that one.

 

***

 

She’s in Aberdeen. She’s never been to Scotland. It’s late, and she can’t sleep.

 

She’s sitting on the balcony of her room, lights from ships reflecting off the North Sea. Ships come limping back into system every week, and they’ve pressed all the old terrestrial shipyards back into service. She’s touring one tomorrow, so they’ve put her top floor of the nicest hotel left standing. She’s flipping through the pictures on her omnitool, and even if she was allowed to have whiskey she wouldn’t be drinking any because then this would feel too much like a wake.

 

_There, baby,_ she thinks, _that’s your Uncle Garrus, and he’s the best shot I ever knew, and he loves you._ She’d taken that picture on the roof of the Presidium, and how Garrus had managed to carve that one perfect afternoon out of those months of grinding horror, she’ll never know, but she knows she loves him for it. The late afternoon sun makes his colony tattoos glow. He’s got his rifle up, one eye narrowed and his mandibles flared in concentration, that perfectly _Garrus_ look because she’d just thrown a bottle and that bottle was _toast._

 

_That’s your Aunt Tali, if there’s anything she can’t fix, then it came out of the creation of the universe already broken, and she loves you._ It’s a good shot of Tali and a terrible one of her, both of them halfway down the bottle of moonjack and weeping with laughter at that point, that angle where you can see the flash of her eyes and the gleam of her open, laughing mouth under the respirator plate. She misses th days when all their problems were solvable with some fast thinking, a decent omnitool and terrible booze.

 

_Uncle Wrex and Aunt Eve and Cousin Grunt, I suppose_ , _and I’m their sister and we’ve had each other’s backs forever and they all love you_. And that’s something to think about. She’s a sister to all Krogan now. Maybe the best thing she could do, a year or so down the line, is heave this kid across her back with all her best guns and go to Tuchanka. There’s going to be work to be done in the DMZ. Lots of new baby krogan to play with. They’d probably let the soft plates in her skull harden up before they teach her baby how to headbutt. Probably.

 

_Hey baby, this is your Uncle James, and he’s got the best heart I ever knew, and he loves you._ James, winking at the camera mid-way through a pull-up, biceps straining through his thin shirt. How much she’d liked him, right from the start, because he didn’t act like she had all the answers, and because he wasn’t afraid to give her shit. And hell, because he looked _fine_ in that shirt.

 

_Here’s Aunt Ash, and she had to go, baby, she saved us all, and she would have loved you._ And that’s actually funny, because Ash in the holo is squinting up at the cam, midway through cleaning that big ugly shotgun she loved, and Jocasta can just picture the expression on her face. _What the hell, Shepard, where do I hold this thing? There’s no grip and I think it’s about to shit on me._ But Ash would have figured that shit out, because Ash was a problem-solver, and Ash was the best. She remembers standing next to Ash on the Citadel, years and years back, when Kaidan was just starting to watch her out of the corner of his eye, Ash saying, _do you ever get the feeling we’re in over our heads?_ And Jocasta thinks, _only every day of my life since._

 

_Baby, look, here’s your Aunt Liara, who’s the smartest and kindest friend I ever had, she’ll take you on adventures digging in the mud and she loves you._ In the photo, looking ethereal but warm and rueful in that way only Liara could pull off. Jacket sleeves shoved high above her elbows, violet flush in her cheeks, only halfway through a translation but already late for mess call. She wonders, abruptly, if Liara had known about this. Drifting together in the warm darkness of their minds before the end of the world, if Liara could have reached out and realized _baby._

 

_And this is your Uncle Mordin, who was so smart and so brave, and he’s sorry he won’t get to meet you, baby, because he would have loved you._ And it’s the truth. Mordin would have _loved_ her baby. He would have made up silly songs to sing to her when she went in for checkups, and he would have said things like, _Shepard, suggest refresher course in remedial biological education if current situation comes as a surprise_ , because Mordin was basically sort of a dick like that. Mordin _could_ have also pointed out somewhere along the line that _Cerberus cybernetic implants and current birth control regimen are not recommended in combination_ , but then again, this had been back when Kaidan was pretty determinedly not talking to her and Mordin consequently might have though she was some kind of monk.

 

_This is your Uncle Thane_ , and oh god, it’s still a raw feeling, a blistered edge, to think of Thane. _He had to go too, baby, far across the sea, but he would have loved you._ The picture’s from before he got too sick, silhouetted against the brilliant wash of light in the window of the Citadel. His body subtly braced, angled with the best sightlines between the main doors and Kaidan’s room, one guard between all the shit in the galaxy and Kaidan, just because he knew she loved him. She can still hear the smile in his voice, when he was dying. _Guide us to where the traveler never tires and the lover never leaves._ He would have loved her baby. He would have had her up navigating the air vents as soon as she could _crawl_.

 

It occurs to her that her baby could be ready for SPECTRE status somewhere around the time she hits preschool.

 

Her omnitool’s flipping randomly now. Pauses on a picture of Kaidan.

 

Really, it’s not a very good picture. Trainor snapped it not long ago, only a week or two before the final push to Earth, back when everyone was jittery and finding excuses to pile into the lounges together, like warm bodies and companionship were these rare commodities that were only going to get rarer from here on out. Tali had rigged up that still, Quarian rotgut fresh-brewed in one of the life support modules, everyone drinking it mixed with the orange juice powder packets and dry ice. _Sonic screwdriver_ , Trainor had dubbed it. In the picture, the lights are low, just a little ebb and flow of people just off center around Jocasta and Kaidan, on the couch with their boots kicked off. Head tipped back against Kaidan’s broad shoulder, angled up so she could watch him sleep. Kaidan’s mouth is hanging open in mid-snore and in the picture and in the moment Jocasta’s so in love it make her heart clench.

 

And it’s mostly now, in the bitter dark around 0:300, that she lets herself think they’re all gone, Joker and EDI, Trainor and Chakwas, everyone on the Normandy, her whole beautiful, mad family, everyone she’s ever loved. That Joker couldn’t have saved everyone, not this time, because they’d been rolling long, long odds for too many years, and no one’s going to bring her crazy biotic boyfriend back to her, and she’s never going to go to sleep with those big arms wrapped around her while he whispers against her hair. 

 

But people need her. This baby needs her. So Jocasta turns off her omnitool and stares out at all that cold, black water until she feels like she can sleep.

 

***

 

She thinks about Eve a lot these days. Wonders if she’s okay. The comm lines to Tuchanka are still dark but the ships that limp through Sol say it’s still standing. Lots of Krogan are heading back that way, packed into anything spaceworthy heading towards the DMZ. She hears her guard talking about it quietly at night. One deep breath and you’re cured.

 

They spent a lot of time talking, she and Eve, in late hours of the night, while Mordin twitched and napped at the lab bench. _What hope gets you through?_ she had asked, because if anyone could understand, it was Eve, and Eve had looked at her calmly and said, _that one day I will not be the mother of soldiers_.

 

It’s a good thought, and Jocasta’s been holding on to it.

 

***

 

She can’t decide on a _name._

She’s made split-second decisions in combat zones when a millisecond of hesitation would have left them all hamburger smears on the tarmac. But she can’t figure out what to name her own baby.

 

Naming it after the dead just seems so fucking _ghoulish,_ like her baby could be an Ash or a Davida, and besides, the list is so long and where would she even ever _start_? She needs to come up with something, though, and soon, because no child should ever be saddled with a name like _Jocasta_. Kaidan had laughed himself sick, in bed with her, the first time she’d told him. _If you want me to be Oedipus, then we’ve got a problem, Shepard,_ and the fucker didn’t stop laughing until she tackled him which turned into wrestling which turned into fucking like weasels on the floor. He’d stuck with _Shepard_ after that, and maybe it should have bothered her, but honestly, no one ever said it the way he did. She would have held him down, made him say it more, if she’d known—

 

The baby kicks, right on cue, when her thoughts tend to stray in morbid and/or depraved directions, which should probably worry her more. _Sorry baby, not my fault your daddy’s a looker._ She uses present tense, and it settles.

 

_Not Lola_ , she tells herself very firmly. James Vega does not have authority on naming anything she loves.

 

***

 

She’s planetside, in a meeting with Sparatus and the Turian transport delegation when her water breaks, because of course she fucking is.

 

To his absolute and eternal credit, Sparatus handles it like a champion. Sits her down and brings her water, calls the medics and cancels her meetings. He even, and what weird parallel universe have they slid into? _pats her shoulder_ as the medics load her into the hospital shuttle. “Spirit’s blessings on your house, Jocasta Shepard,” he says, and she needs to take a hit of that medic’s oxygen, _now_.

 

***

 

At the hospital just outside London, which is only half rebuilt but had the benefit of being close, things are happening. They mostly involve a lot of pain, a lot of hardcore drugs not doing what they should, and a lot of doctors making various kinds of reassuring noises at her. It somehow isn’t reassuring.

 

“Is there anyone we can call for you?” asks a nurse, and Jocasta has to close her eyes.

 

Like most people in her line of work, she’s got a living will, a DNR, and an emergency contact list a parsec long. It starts with _Kaidan Alenko_ , because they both changed their info after Sovereign and the Citadel, and she’s never changed it back. Even when he was hollowed out and furious and deliberately staying on the other side of galactic map _specifically_ not to talk to her, she never changed it back.

 

She never asked if he’d changed his.

 

Next it reads _Dr. Liara Tsoni_ , and then _Garrus_ _Vakarian_ and _Admiral_ _David Anderson_ and _Tali’Zorah nar Rayya_ and _Dr. Karin Chakwas_ and it’s a long list, a very long list, but—

 

She has to close her eyes, and then suddenly thinks _I bet Conrad would get here in five minutes flat if I called him right now_ , and the thought’s so perfectly, ludicrous funny that she seizes laughing. Tears stream out of her eyes, and another contraction hits. Painkiller injection meets four hundred million credits of next-gen Cerberus cybernetics, give or take the Illusive Man’s console change, and the poor epidural doesn’t stand a chance.

 

“No,” she says, when she can get a breath, “No, let’s just do this now.”

 

They don’t let her keep her gun. Six hours in, she can concede that this was a pretty good call on the doctor’s part.

 

***

 

Nine hours in, and Jocasta has done a lot of yelling, and pushing, and she may have mule-kicked an Asari nurse hard enough to crack her orbital bone, but that was mostly an accident.

 

 And it’s the strangest, craziest thing. She’s here in this hospital delivery ward, where there’s still a massive hole in the ceiling tacked over with clear plastic sheeting. There’s a dozen people blurring in and out around her, and she’s soaked in sweat with her heels braced up, pain ripping her down the middle, and through it all, she starts to laugh.

 

Because of this, this right here, in this moment, she’s exultant. Someone’s been gunning for Jocasta Shepard since the day she was born— Batarian slavers, pirates, Saran, Cerberus, Collectors, Reapers, it doesn’t _matter_. She’s _here,_ those bastards are never going to grind her down _,_ and she _is having this god damn baby._

And then, somewhat abruptly after all that yelling, she has the god damn baby.

 

She’s got a thatch of wet black hair, just like Kaidan’s. She stares up at Jocasta with huge, unfocused, and incredulous dark eyes, as if to say _Mom, can you_ believe _this absolute_ pile _of kakliosaur shit,_ and then, as though working her way step by step through a complex and laborious process, she scrunches her tiny face up, wrinkled and red, and then she _howls._

_Well,_ thinks Jocasta, _you got your mom’s lungs, at least._

It gets surprisingly quiet, after a while. Doctors and nurses stream in and out, talking a little, flashing scanners, but it’s just a little island, her and the baby, a warm little blanketed lump lying between her breasts, barely heavier than a machine pistol. Her and Kaidan’s baby.

She puts her nose down, breathes in the hospital-soap- _baby_ smell of that drying, feathery black hair, and oh _god,_ this is real. And she has to blink back tears when it comes to her, _Petra_. _Petra,_ she thinks, _you’ll be the rock in the stream, and the waves will crash around you, but you’ll never break._

She’s back in her room, later, Petra in her arms, and she very abruptly doesn’t know what to do next. Then one of her Krogan guards, Brock, is staring through crack in the door. He’s smiling with all ninety-eight teeth. “Fine offspring, Battlemaster,” he growls at her. “Sturdy.”

And that is how Brock and his brothers Drack and Zack end up braiding Jocasta’s hair, mostly by committee, and mostly badly, while she pulls Petra’s feathery tufts into pigtails and tucks them under what looks like an extremely tiny Alliance beenie. Because what to do next is apparently throw on the fancy kind of hospital gown, shove her gun in the waistband of her hilariously huge postpartum surgical underwear, and take a very careful barefoot stroll through the sunnier, less-bombed out wing of the hospital, the first joint expedition of Systems Alliance Commander Jocasta Shepard and Baby First Class Petra Shepard Alenko, hobbling along together in the middle of ten extremely proud Krogan soldiers. They’re singing that song about her. It has a new verse. This one’s about how she crushes her foes with the might of her fecund womb as well as her merciless fist. Enough omnitools flash that this is almost definitely going to make the galactic news.  _First Human SPECTRE Has Terrible Fashion Sense, Baby Embarrassed to be Associated With Her._

 

She hums along. Dignity is overrated anyway.

 

***

She blinks awake. Petra’s asleep in the bassinette on the left. Her gun’s on the right. She goes for the gun.

 

On the bedside table, her omnitool is chirping quietly, madly. Flash of **_8965 new alerts_** , more every second, a steadily ticking upward count of priority calls, messages, media requests, news headlines, and all she sees is one word, and it’s _Normandy._

 

Someone is in the hall. Someone is yelling in the hall, and she hears ten assault rifles snap into firing position, and with a voice that tears out of her, her command voice, loud enough to hear over a bombing run and a Reaper fleet in low atmosphere, she _bellows_ , “ _Squad, belay firing.”_

 

There’s the _click-click-click_ of rifles coming down, the sound of ten Krogan shuffling their feet, and then he’s in the door.

 

He’s gone a little grey at the temples, and something’s chipped a slice across the bridge of his nose, deep enough that it’ll probably scar. He’s framed in the doorway, blinking at her. And then his knees just give out, like he’s managed to get this far, but this is the end, no further, and he drops to the floor.

 

Sitting in the doorframe, eyes wide and agonized, and he reaches out one hand towards her, like they’re both in a dream, and her heart is burning as she props herself up. Puts down the gun and picks up Petra, who’s awake now and starting to snuffle. Walks barefoot in her hospital gown, four steps across the room. It feels farther. Her voice is hoarse. “Bastard, I just had a baby, and you’re making me get out of bed?”

 

Kaidan makes a sound she’s never heard before, not even when he was dying. Like a laugh and sob got too tangled up in his throat, and then he’s pulling her down, and she’s going down, and they’re wrapped around each other, too tight to ever shake loose. Petra finally wakes up enough to scream about it.

 

“Shepard,” he says, mouth against her hair. “Oh god, Shepard.”

 

She curls in against him, her cheek against his collarbone and he wraps his arms around them both. Petra, hiccupping, is staring up with watery suspicion, and she’s laughing and crying at the same time, and she can’t stop, can’t get her breath.

 

“Look, baby,” she finally manages to croak. “Daddy’s home.”


End file.
